Australasian College of Behavioural Optometrists

By Paula Peachey

The Federal Government ‘Get Up and Grow’ guidelines provide advice on healthy child rearing.  The guidelines address both childhood obesity and the number of children with neuro-developmental deficits.   National attention was achieved with the recommendation that:
“Children should be banned from watching Television until they turn TWO!”

Optometrists are aware of the positive effects of controlled visual experiences, as these are fundamental to development.  Many negative effects are caused by adverse distortion to sensory experiences, deprivation, adverse eye strain and lack of opportunity to re-calibrate vision to distance.  Neuro-Developmental deficits in optomotor and perceptual operations are known to co-exist for many children diagnosed with dyslexia.  While there are treatments typically able to restore functional vision to age expected, it is known that many children remain undiagnosed and untreated.

Without an understanding that eye defects (problems within the eye) are different to functional vision deficits (poor mind control of visual inspection and visual processing), the above comments stretch parents to understand the rationale for these recommendations.  Both genetic and environmental experiences contribute to development of efficient functional vision.

These experiences are known to be so critical.  Excessive ‘screen time’ represents  ‘missed opportunities’ for healthy real-world experiences and hobbles children with an unusually high visual attention grabbing stimulus on a two dimensional screen without supportive interaction.
The take home message for parents is ‘Help your child to develop to their Functional Vision potential’.